VISCO: Bringing Visual Spatial Querying to Reality

This paper reports on the evolution of the spatial (sketchbased) query language VISCO and its implementation. The first design of VISCO’s query language was presented at VL ’97. The language is based on a strong naive physics metaphor for query objects (e.g. marbles, nails, rubberbands). We shortly review the prominent aspects of the revised version of VISCO’s query language. The main focus of this paper is on VISCO’s implementation using city maps of Hamburg as example domain. Its innovative user interface consists of three interconnected components: a graphical (syntax-directed) query editor and visual language compiler, a browser for inspecting the query results, and a map viewerforbrowsing the spatial database. Wealso briefly report on the process of compiling, optimizing, and executing VISCO’s queries. Keywords— visual query languages, environments and systems, graphical representation of constraints, human computer interaction (HCI), spatial information systems (SIS), graph matching, optimizing visual language compilers.